


New Leaves

by thesometimeswarrior



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, Spider-Man: Homecoming (2017), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Canon Compliant, Gen, Howard Stark's A+ Parenting, Hurt/Comfort, Mentor/Protégé, Missing Scene, Post-Spider-Man: Homecoming, Reconciliation, Self-Improvement, Tony Stark Feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-02
Updated: 2018-07-02
Packaged: 2019-06-01 04:19:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,025
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15134948
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thesometimeswarrior/pseuds/thesometimeswarrior
Summary: Tony sighs, shakes his glass so that he can look down to watch the ice cubes in his drink clink against its sides. “I told you my dad wasn’t so big on the whole support thing. Well, he also wasn’t so big on the whole communicating thing. So I’m pretty shitty at it too. But like I said, I’m trying to break the cycle of shame here. And I owe you some explanations.”Peter and Tony, two weeks after Homecoming.





	New Leaves

About two weeks after Peter turns down Tony Stark’s offer to be an Avenger, Happy Hogan shows up again—this time on his doorstep. (Because it’s a Saturday this time, and all things considered, it’s probably more pleasant to wait outside a Queens apartment building than inside a high school bathroom in Midtown.) “Boss wants to see you again.”

“Upstate?” Peter creases his eyebrows, wondering if Mr. Stark is going to try to convince him to take him up on the offer...given that he didn’t before. The idea makes his stomach lurch, as much as the thought of being on the Avengers terrifies him after Coney Island, and as much as he’s convinced—especially after the whole thing with Liz's dad—of the value of fighting for the little guy in a way that the Avengers couldn’t or wouldn’t or can’t, the thought of disappointing Tony terrifies him even more. 

“Yeah,” answers Happy. “And he told me to tell you it’s not about joining the team. He seemed convinced you’d worry that it would be.”

“Oh.” Peter tries—and most likely fails—to appear nonchalant. “What’s it about, then?”

“No idea,” Happy responds as he opens the door, and Peter clambers in. “Your aunt here?”

“She’s working. But I’ll text her and tell her I’ve got an internship thing. She won’t mind.” 

As it happens, he’s dropped the internship pretense with May, now that she knows the truth, but he’s not sure Mr. Stark would approve (even if he is Mr. _I-Am-Iron-Man_ —Peter has seen the 2008 news clips on YouTube dozens of times, as a part of his many internet searches for “Tony Stark”), so Happy doesn’t need to know that. Instead, he simply texts his aunt: _mr stark wants to see me—on way upstate_ , and snaps a selfie to prove both that he’s okay and that he’s not in the suit. 

When they arrive and Peter gets out of the car, Happy merely rolls downs the window. “See you later.”

“Aren’t you coming?”

“No—Tony wants to see you alone.”

“Oh.” His face flushes. Since Coney Island he’s been by the book, staying close to the ground, giving old ladies directions and stopping the occasional crook from stealing cars and purses—but clearly he’d messed up somehow, if Tony Stark is so intent of seeing him alone up here. Peter gulps. What had he done wrong?

He doesn’t have much time to think about it though, because Mr. Stark is waiting for him at the top of the elevator. 

“Hey, kid,” he says before Peter can say anything. “Want a drink?”

“But,” Peter stammers. “Mr. Stark, I’m not—”

“I meant like a Shirley Temple or something.”

“I—”

“Great. FRIDAY, the kid’ll have a Shirley Temple, and I’ll have a scotch on the rocks.”

“You told me not to let you have alcohol anymore, Boss,” FRIDAY protests through speakers in ceiling. 

“But this sort of thing is the exception. Override.”

“You said no overrides, Boss. The _No Crutches_ protocol.” 

“Shit. Fine.” Tony closes his eyes briefly and pinches the bridge of his nose. “Make that two Shirley Temples, then.”

“Mr. Stark,” Peter interjects. “What am I—”

“Wait for the drinks, Parker.”

Were it anyone else in front of him, Peter might raise his eyebrow and make some smart-ass sarcastic comment about how a Shirley Temple—all grenadine and ginger ale and floressantly neon red cherries—would help a conversation flow about as much as the Hulk would make a good therapist, but given the circumstances—and wait, Mr. Stark actually _knows_ the Hulk, doesn’t he?!—he closes his mouth, rubs his arms nervously.

A moment later, Tony gestures to two chairs, from whose arms their mocktails have appeared, and grips his drink as they sit. 

“Well, this is awful,” Mr. Stark states matter-of-factly, looking at the glass and grimacing after he takes a sip.

Peter chuckles nervously. “Hah. Yeah.”

“Christ, kid, I’m not gonna _eat_ you! Or ground you, or kick you off the decathlon team, or whatever it is that you’re so terrified I’m gonna do.”

“Right. So. Um…Mr. Stark, what _am_ I doing here?”

Tony sighs, shakes his glass so that he can look down to watch the ice cubes in his drink clink against its sides. “I told you my dad wasn’t so big on the whole support thing.”

Now, Peter looks down, remembering the conversation, the damn _terrible_ timing of the skype call—or knock-off skype call—to his suit in the middle of the whole ordeal on the ferry. (Well, actually, it had been pretty lucky timing because if Mr. Stark _hadn’t_ called, then he never would have showed up and then the ferry would have split in half, and people almost certainly would have drowned, and it would have been _his fault, all his fault_ …But it meant that Peter never had got to hear the complements and praise that he could tell the man was about to give him, which would have meant so much to him…and instead Mr. Stark had come to save his butt and butts of the hundreds of people on the ferry, and rather than praise him, had yelled at him and taken his suit away…)

“Well,” Mr. Stark continues, snapping Peter out of his thoughts. “He also wasn’t so big on the whole communicating thing. So I’m pretty shitty at it too. But like I said, I’m trying to break the cycle of shame here. And I owe you some explanations.”

“Really, Mr. Stark, it’s oka—”

“Shut up, kid.”

Peter complies.

“I shouldn’t have taken your suit away.”

“It’s fi—”

“But I just was trying to keep you from repeating my mistakes. What do you know about the Sokovia Accords?”

“The Sokovia Accords? Um…” The question catches him off guard, and he squints, trying to recall what they’d learned in school and to reconcile it with his own memories of six months ago. “That there was some meeting of the UN about the Avengers, because of what happened in Sokovia? And you and Captain America disagreed about it? And then there was a bomb at the UN meeting that killed a whole bunch of people—and so you and Captain America fought…And _I_ fought Captain America too. And then he got away, and was declared a war criminal.”

“Pretty good summary, kid. Do you know what specifically the UN meeting was about?”

“Well…I know we learned this in Civics, but…I, um….”

Mr. Stark silences him with a hand. “I’m not the principle, you don’t have to give me excuses. The meeting was to try to regulate the Avengers, because...” He sighs. “Well, a lot of people died in Sokovia. And New York before that, and…”

“But that wasn’t _your_ fau—”

“Some of it was. Like when we dropped a _building_ on a kid named Charlie Spencer who wasn’t much older than you. That wasn’t Ultron. That was us.”

Peter pushes the sudden image of himself stuck under the warehouse Liz's dad had crushed on him out of his mind and forces the accompanying tightness out of his chest, in an attempt to keep himself present to the topic at hand. “But you were tryi—”

“Yeah. We were. We got so caught up in trying to beat the bad guy that we didn’t think about the people we were there to protect. And a lot of them paid the price for it.” He pauses, voice dripping with a palpable bitterness, and at last raises his head to look Peter in the eyes. “You know what that does to you? Knowing you have all that blood on your hands? Knowing the parents whose kids are dead, or the kids whose parents are dead, because of _you_? I was trying to protect you from that.”

Peter blinks, stunned into silence. Suddenly, the fact that Mr. Stark had shown up at the ferry himself—and the look in the man's eyes as he chewed Peter out afterward—is all the more understandable.

“And when I saw you on that ferry, it was like looking in a mirror—at the better parts of myself anyway—except I saw the person I was before last year.” Tony returns his gaze to the rapidly decreasing Shirley Temple in his hand. “And then you said you wanted to be _like me_ …I couldn’t let that happen to you.” A pause. “I thought I could stop it by taking your suit away. But I obviously overestimated my own importance in your life. It was never about the suit for you.”

“No, Mr. Stark, I _love_ the sui—”

“I know you do, kid. That not what I was saying. It’s just—the suit didn’t _make_ you a hero like mine made me. You got that all on your own, and you had it before I ever roped you into this whole thing. Probably before that spider even bit you. I shouldn’t have made you doubt that. Sorry.”

“So…” Peter says after a moment. “When you said that I should be a Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man and look after the little guy…it wasn’t because you thought I couldn’t handle the bigger stuff? It was because you thought I’d be… _too much_ like you?”

Mr. Stark looks up again, nods. “Yeah. But also…you know who Nick Fury is, kid?”

“Um…”

“Former Director of S.H.I.E.L.D. Back when there was a S.H.I.E.L.D. Guy who put together the Avengers in the first place. The way he described the Avengers back in the day was as a team of people to fight the battles that other people couldn’t. Well, everything that happened with Sokovia and the accords got me thinking that maybe there’s battles that the Avengers _can’t_ fight. Because we’re _too big_ or something, I don’t know. And someone _has_ to.”

“Looking out for the little guy.”

The man nods. “And when I met you all those months ago and saw that you already knew the things about power and responsibility that had taken me over thirty years to figure out, and that you wanted to look out for the people around you...I thought you were the guy. To do what we couldn’t.”

“But, then, Mr. Stark…if you wanted me to do what the Avengers couldn’t do…why’d you offer to make me one?”

Tony shrugs. “I thought you wanted it. And I screwed up in a real way by taking your suit away, nearly got you _killed_ at Homecoming in my attempt to make myself feel less guilty, and rather than apologize in an equally real way that actually acknowledged wrongdoing and wasn’t _all about me_ , I thought if I gave you something nice I wouldn’t have to think about it. Classic me, I guess—thinking I can buy my way out of human emotions or responsibilities. Just like my dad.” He gulps down the rest of his Shirley Temple, and when he speaks again, it's with an air of forced nonchalance. “But like I said. New leaf for me. Trying to break the cycle. I’m sorry I took your suit away.”

“I…it’s okay, Mr. Stark,” Peter stammers, after a silent moment, feeling somehow that these words are entirely insufficient for the amount that Mr. Stark has just confided in him.

“And, listen, I know that when I said it before, it was part of my self-serving offer, but I still think you could do with some mentoring, Avenger or not. No strings attached. A jaded superhero probably has _something_ to offer to a Friendly Neighborhood Spider-Man. So I thought you could come up here to the Compound a couple times a month. We could run the training protocol on your suit. Practice some techniques. Talk hero stuff. Maybe play around in the lab. And I have a feeling you could probably teach me a thing or two too. Only if you want. Think about it for—”

“You serious?! Yes!” He pauses. “And Mr. Stark?”

“Yeah, kid?”

“Whatever your dad was like…you’re…you’re really cool.”

“Thanks, Parker.” He smirks. “Now, should we get started?”

**Author's Note:**

> Hope you enjoyed! Please consider leaving a comment!


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